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Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

[…] British state had been referred to again. Atkinson referred to International Times at that time ‘operating out of an office near Charing Cross, the set-up had an agent of the Somoza family hanging around’. (6) And the smear worked. Within a week I had received a letter warning me about Larry O’Hara from a […]

Children and the Official Secrets Act

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

Some of the spook recruitment pitches in the media of the last two years have gone out of their way to impress upon prospective candidates the family-friendly credentials of the major state spook employers.(1) But such measures, no matter how sincere and/or necessary, are for the most part aimed at a parent’s convenience – and … Read more

The two Indonesias and the two Americas

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] battalion was at the center of massacre and torture operations in the 1960s as in the 1990s. Its chief then, Sarwo Edhie, has been called a CIA agent or contact. It was he who, while giving orders in Indonesia for the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party, used the American Army word, ‘psywar.’ ‘The […]

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

Larry Tye New York: Owl Books, 2002, pb $16.00 ISBN 0 8050 6789 2   If Edward Bernays hadn’t existed, Edward Bernays would have invented him. And in fact this is more or less what happened. This is the long-awaited paperback edition of the first full-length biography of Bernays, who, like President Harry Truman, added … Read more

The murder of Hilda Murrell: ten years on

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

Introduction Clear cut examples of political murder, or state assassination in the mainland UK have been virtually non-existent. It is that fact which has helped focus so much attention on the deaths of Hilda Murrell and, in Scotland, of Willie McRae. Lobster got into this area relatively early, printing in issue 16 a long report … Read more

George Orwell and the IRD

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

[…] its creation, it always seemed likely that Bilderberg was a British enterprise; and Wilford concludes this, citing a C. D. Jackson comment that Retinger was a British agent, an opinion ‘pretty well shared by some other people who are in a position to know better than I ’ – reference, presumably, to the CIA […]

George Korkala’s address book

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

George Gregory Korkala was the ‘soldier’ in the activities of ‘lieutenant’ Frank Terpil and ‘leader’ Edwin Wilson. Wilson and Terpil are both ex-CIA, though when their relationships with the ‘company’ ended is not known. Korkala was arrested in February 1982 at a trade fair on security devices in Madrid. Spanish police carried out the arrest … Read more

Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK

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Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

[…] — and doubts about his credibility were immeasurably increased by the failure of his children to back up his alibi. Marita Lorenz, former lover of Fidel Castro-turned-CIA- agent, testified that she had been part of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy along with Hunt, another Watergate ‘plumber’ Frank Sturgis, and some Cubans. But her first-hand knowledge […]

Morningside Mata Haris: How MI6 deceived Scotland’s great and good

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b <www.birlinn.co.uk>   Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish … Read more

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